Gran Turismo 6 Announced by Sony

At an event celebrating 15 years of Gran Tursimo, franchise creator and President of Polyphany Digital Kazunori Yamauchi formally announced that Gran Turismo 6 is set to release this holiday season for the PlayStation 3.

Alongside the fact that the game will be arriving later this year, Yamauchi also announced that the game’s engine has undergone a major overhaul that will make it “smoother for the future.”

Yamauchi had this to say about the engine for Gran Turismo 6: “The rendering engine will be completely renewed for GT 6. There will be a revamped Physics Engine, new suspension, tire and aerodynamics modelling. We’ll have 200 more cars than Gran Turismo 5, with 1200 available at release. More cars will be released after launch, too.”

Gran Turismo 6 will also boast a number of other features, including 33 locations, 71 course layouts (including 19 new ones), a course maker with emphasis on building communities around player creation, and “expanded connectivity with other devices” to make the GT6 experience more social as a whole. The exact details of this expanded connectivity are not yet known, but it can be expected that we’ll learn more about them in the coming months leading up to the game’s release.

Gran Turismo 5 is the best-selling PlayStation 3 exclusive of all time, boasting sales of over 10 million copies total. The game soldiered on through a long development process, enduring a lengthy spat of delays and finally releasing in the US on November 24th of 2010. At this point in time, it looks like Gran Turismo 6 is on schedule to release this year and won’t have to endure the same fate as its predecessor. Interestingly enough, there is no word on whether or not Gran Turismo 6 will release on the PlayStation 4, which many speculate is to prevent any sort of confusion between GT6 and the upcoming Drive Club. Of course, with the numbers GT5 did, and considering the franchise’s successful history on the platform, it would be more surprising to not see the game on next gen consoles in one form or another.

A demo for the game will be released in June, and we can expect to learn more about it at E3 and Gamescom later this year.